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We consider the problem of online allocation subject to a long-term fairness penalty. Contrary to existing works, however, we do not assume that the decision-maker observes the protected attributes -- which is often unrealistic in practice.…
Research on the multi-armed bandit problem has studied the trade-off of exploration and exploitation in depth. However, there are numerous applications where the cardinal absolute-valued feedback model (e.g. ratings from one to five) is not…
The early sections of this paper present an analysis of a Markov decision model that is known as the multi-armed bandit under the assumption that the utility function of the decision maker is either linear or exponential. The analysis…
We introduce the problem of model selection for contextual bandits, where a learner must adapt to the complexity of the optimal policy while balancing exploration and exploitation. Our main result is a new model selection guarantee for…
We consider a contextual version of multi-armed bandit problem with global knapsack constraints. In each round, the outcome of pulling an arm is a scalar reward and a resource consumption vector, both dependent on the context, and the…
We present a PAC-Bayesian analysis of lifelong learning. In the lifelong learning problem, a sequence of learning tasks is observed one-at-a-time, and the goal is to transfer information acquired from previous tasks to new learning tasks.…
We study the problem of experiment planning with function approximation in contextual bandit problems. In settings where there is a significant overhead to deploying adaptive algorithms -- for example, when the execution of the data…
Decision making under uncertain environments in the maximization of expected reward while minimizing its risk is one of the ubiquitous problems in many subjects. Here, we introduce a novel problem setting in stochastic bandit optimization…
We study model selection in linear bandits, where the learner must adapt to the dimension (denoted by $d_\star$) of the smallest hypothesis class containing the true linear model while balancing exploration and exploitation. Previous papers…
We study the problem of stochastic contextual bandits in the agnostic setting, where the goal is to compete with the best policy in a given class without assuming realizability or imposing model restrictions on losses or rewards. In this…
Bandit is a framework for designing sequential experiments. In each experiment, a learner selects an arm $A \in \mathcal{A}$ and obtains an observation corresponding to $A$. Theoretically, the tight regret lower-bound for the general bandit…
We give nearly-tight upper and lower bounds for the improving multi-armed bandits problem. An instance of this problem has $k$ arms, each of whose reward function is a concave and increasing function of the number of times that arm has been…
Contextual bandit algorithms -- a class of multi-armed bandit algorithms that exploit the contextual information -- have been shown to be effective in solving sequential decision making problems under uncertainty. A common assumption…
We consider a general multi-armed bandit problem with correlated (and simple contextual and restless) elements, as a relaxed control problem. By introducing an entropy regularisation, we obtain a smooth asymptotic approximation to the value…
Existing metrics for reinforcement learning (RL) such as regret, PAC bounds, or uniform-PAC (Dann et al., 2017), typically evaluate the cumulative performance, while allowing the agent to play an arbitrarily bad policy at any finite time t.…
This paper considers the problem of maximizing an expectation function over a finite set, or finite-arm bandit problem. We first propose a naive stochastic bandit algorithm for obtaining a probably approximately correct (PAC) solution to…
In this paper we consider the two-armed bandit problem, which often naturally appears per se or as a subproblem in some multi-armed generalizations, and serves as a starting point for introducing additional problem features. The…
The linear submodular bandit problem was proposed to simultaneously address diversified retrieval and online learning in a recommender system. If there is no uncertainty, this problem is equivalent to a submodular maximization problem under…
We study an online stochastic matching problem in which an algorithm sequentially matches $U$ users to $K$ arms, aiming to maximize cumulative reward over $T$ rounds under budget constraints. Without structural assumptions, computing the…
Reinforcement learning is an attractive approach to learn good resource allocation and scheduling policies based on data when the system model is unknown. However, the cumulative regret of most RL algorithms scales as $\tilde O(\mathsf{S}…